One Year In Canada

Tomorrow marks my one year anniversary of coming to Canada. A lot has happened in the past year..

It’s hard to put into words how I feel. The time has flown by so fast, but like I said so much as happened. I came to Canada and Kitchener-Waterloo specifically for a college course in construction. Which I would be finishing in two weeks if I was still enrolled.. dropping out was not planned at all, but I felt like it was the right thing to do and looking back, I stand by that decision.

For the past year, I’ve had a lot of different jobs– I inspected solar panels, repaired bicycles, did general maintenance, worked in kitchens–washing dishes and cooking, worked behind a bar, helped renovate a house.. I did one semester of college and learned some more carpentry skills and got to gain some experience in a totally new field, masonry.

I’ve had the chance to connect with a number of old friends (finally being relatively closer helped, hundreds vs. thousands of miles) and I’ve made some new friends here in K/W too.

I’m in the middle of packing up my things. I remember last year when I was moving houses in August, I got a friend of mine who had a truck¹* to help me move my stuff across town. We fit it all on in one load, I said to him that there was something poetic about having all my material possessions in the back of a pickup. Now I’m preparing to head out on an indefinite² journey with nothing more than what’s on my back. Sure I have lived out of a backpack for a few months back in Germany, but I did not travel light and wouldn’t have been able to walk any considerable distance or been able to survive a night on my own.

Two weeks from now I plan on embarking on a Trans-Continental journey.. Ontario to Alaska. Most peoples reaction to that is “why Alaska?” and to be honest, there’s no one real reason.. but there are a few influencing factors:

• It’s about as far West as you can get before you go East (funny how that works in our minds). So if I don’t make it all the way, I’ll still be somewhere else.
• I can’t lie, as cliche as it is Into The Wild made me want to visit back when I was 16 or so.
• I like the idea of visiting some spectacular untamed wilderness
• There are many seasonal jobs out there –this was an idea that I had for a bit, but for most of them you need to commit for a decent length of time and that’s not what I want to do right now.

I don’t have much planned out, no plane tickets booked.. I want to see Canada, up close and personal. And “Der Weg ist das Ziel” it’s about the journey not the destination. How do I plan on getting out there? However I can.. walking, bussing, hitchhiking. We’ll see how it goes.

To be honest I wasn’t planning on keeping this blog going, but a few people have mentioned it in the past couple weeks.. and maybe this’ll help keep my parents/relatives at ease during my journey! –A little reminder that yes, I’m still alive!

That’s all for now. One more week of work and then I have a week to prepare myself mentally and physically before I head out into the wild blue yonder..

*I’m copying David Foster Wallace by doing this –imitation is flattery right?– I usually put extra comments/related information that I want to add in brackets after a sentence, but I figured I’d try out footnotes, as a way to expound without

¹ He was a friend from work and we had several long talks about our dreams of traveling West and our interest in nature and living a simple life.. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to him, but he helped me to stick to this idea. Thank you for that Davis!

² When I was younger I always thought that indefinite was synonymous with infinite.. I don’t plan on this trip being infinite, but there’s not really any plan beyond coming back East in August for a wedding right now.